SHADOWED HISTORY

[June 29th, 2005] Fiction that strives to do more than tell a good story reeks like perfume on a perfidious man. When one sets out to write the great American or social or feminist or whatever novel, the story is often sacrificed for the political statement. That's the effect of Sam Brumbaugh's ambitious debut novel, Goodbye, Goodness, which, at its best, paints wildly engaging characters alienated by a mediated and medicated world. At its worst, though, the novel segues from the tragic story at its center to make that dreaded larger point. The substory here concerns the narrator's great-great grandmother, Annie Oakley, and the larger point has something to do with the lie of the American dream.

The novel begins with the narrator, Hayward Theiss, recovering from a car accident in an empty Malibu beach house. He spends weeks hiding and recalling moments of his life, as revealed through an amnesiac fog. These stories combine to tell a harrowing tale of Theiss' battles with depression, deception and drugs as he loses his career in television and his girl. In the course of his recovery, the story bounces back and forth from Malibu to Georgetown and all over Theiss' personal chronology.

It's a bit of a jumble, but Brumbaugh's storytelling is refreshing, skirting the sensationalism of drug lit and painting the novel's other two main characters with revealing detail: Will, an impulsive arts journalist, and Kimmel, a difficult musician. But just when, for instance, Will's apathy toward the world of publishing begins to reveal itself as something deeper, Brumbaugh thrusts the reader, once again, back into the late 19th century as Annie Oakley watches her world deteriorate. And suddenly Will's story looks like a carbon copy of the traditional lost-dreams novel. That might be what Brumbaugh intended, but it still overshadows the story.